New Research Explains Billable Hour's Staying Power!

Well, not exactly, but this article in the Telegraph discusses an experiment exploring humans' preference for a familiar (though less efficient) path, and found:

most of us are happy to play follow-my-leader, even if we are trailing after someone who does not know where they are going and taking the most meandering route.  Even more striking, even when we are shown a faster route, we prefer to stick with the old one and tell others to take the long road too, a finding that could have lethal implications when it comes to evacuating a building or ship in an emergency.

In the study, participants were led from one room to another. When asked to return to the first room, almost all took the familiar path back, even when they were aware of a shorter path:

All but one person took the route they had been led. What we were surprised by was how strong this effect was, even when the alternative route was much shorter .... They preferred the long route even when the experimenter had drawn attention to the alternative route, or when the experimenter took the long route solely to pick up a fallen poster, eliminating the possibility that participants thought the experimenter had a good, but unknown, reason to take the long route. By asking participants to collect the next guinea pig in the experiment, the scientists observed that each person in the chain copied the route of the participant before them: a simple tradition that meant the alternative route was never discovered.

Interesting food for thought, don't you think?